Posts Tagged ‘Badges

Why cant we define a BiS List

I should send Theck some cookies for continually giving me great topics for discussion on this blog. Yesterday he did a great analysis of the different options for each gear slot and broke down some great gear sets. The problem we as a community have faced is that there really is not one best in slot list. While some of our newer contributors are trying to compile lists and get posts stickied, they all fall short of Theck in their analysis because of one thing, there is too much gear. What I mean by this is that blizzard has graced us with three different pieces for almost every slot, and each piece is tailored to a specific purpose, threat, avoidance, or effective health.

My habit with Thecks posts is to read the conclusions first, as he loves to write more than me, and then read the main body of work, so I will provide you with his conclusions first, which I completely agree with….

The EH enthusiast – T10 Helm/Shoulders, Cat/Kraken/Pillars for massive Armor. The off-set shoulders can be subbed in if you don’t want the set bonus.

The Stam enthusiast – T10 Helm/Chest, Boneguard/Taldaram/LostHope. Unconcerned with armor, they pick up the 18 stam bonuses while trading as little avoidance as possible. Possible variant is T10 Helm/Chest + Boneguard/Taldaram/Pillars if they care about armor a little bit.

The Avoidance Lover – T10 Helm/Shoulders/Chest/Legs, Taldaram’s gloves. Gives you the highest avoidance possible along with the 4-piece bonus.

This is the TLDR version of his analysis, but I think it is important to know why we got to this conclusion, and not just what pieces of gear you should pick up. I honestly think this is valuable information when it comes to gearing choices and the selection of how to spend this months most precious commodity, an Emblem of Frost.

Our options and choices

Since Blizzard was generous enough to give us three different pieces of gear for almost every slot, they have made it very hard for those people in the community who love the concept of a BiS gear list to create or find one. The fact that we have a significant amount of gear which is very specialized makes the assignment of Best in Slot a very difficult one. With that being said, the specialization of gear has allowed us to create close to BiS lists for specific functions. In previous tiers, you had a few options for rings, cloaks, necks, and a few pieces of gear, to craft your Effective Health set or your Avoidance set, however now we have a piece for almost every slot.

I wanted to focus on our progression set, because that is what most of us will be wearing for a majority of the encounters in the next few months. As the final wing opens up, and the Lich King’s defeat unlocks hard modes, we will need to focus on gearing for a few tank check encounters. What this means is that we need to increase our ability to take unmitigated damage, and mitigate the rest. There are bonus armor pieces galore, and a few pieces that offer ungodly amounts of stamina on them, which we will want to focus on when compiling this set. As you can see in Theck’s suggestions for the EH lover, we can squeeze a lot of bonus armor out of two badge pieces and a crafted piece. This means that these pieces of gear are available to everyone and we do not have to worry about the rng of loot dropping off of a specific boss.

Special Considerations and Caveats

Theck also pointed out in his post that there are some caveats to your gearing strategies. These caveats come from the fact that the pieces that you can acquire are so full of stats such as expertise and hit that you can not just slap on all of the hit and expertise pieces because you will be WAY over the hit cap, and probably even over the expertise hard cap. With that being said, when compiling these sets there are even places where you will need to trade out some expertise or hit for a lesser piece simply because it is wasted itemization.

When comparing some of the pieces, you will notice that Theck points out that you have the ability to drop below the soft cap for expertise, and this is something you should NEVER do because of the relative gains that it will give you. It is interesting to note that some of the better pieces at the 264 item level are then eclipsed by the T10 at the 277 level. What I mean by this is that there are three pieces of T10 that are best in slot once upgraded to the 277 item level. For those of you who never think you will see hard modes, or will not see them for some time, the choices become much easier for you. For those of you who will be attempting them in the first week and believe that you can get your hand on a piece of 277 T10, it gets a bit more difficult.

Armor versus T10

To quote Theck once again –

As an interesting side note, let’s look just at Pillars and Cataclysmic. If you had to choose one of these to replace T10, Pillars is almost hands-down the better choice. It sacrifices less avoidance and gives you slightly more armor. Both pieces are roughly threat-neutral provided you’re soft-capped without either – the expertise gain from Cataclysmic offsets the STR loss, and the STR gain on Pillars offsets the expertise loss.

Cataclysmic is superior only if:

You’re below the expertise soft-cap, in which case it’s threat positive, or

You lose uncrittability by using Pillars

This is a very good point which shows the very dynamic nature of trying to assemble gear sets. This is an ideal example of the balancing act you have to do when selecting an item for any given slot, and your decisions ramifications on other items you may want to use. The Cataclysmic Chest and the T10 legs both have 82 expertise on them. If you have to make the decision between these two, and you lean towards the Pillars, you have just effectively lost 164 expertise.

You have to take this into consideration because if you want to go with a balanced set, where you use the T10 chest and the Pillars of Might, you will have to find your expertise other places, namely the boots and the gloves. We can use this as an example for any other combination of gear. If you decide to forgo a stat on two pieces, you have to see what it has on the effect of your overall gear set. For me, If I chose to use the EH set that theck outlined, I am going to have to wear the ToTGC bracers and Cloak (off jaraxxus), to make it to the soft cap. Now this isn’t to say that you cant do your job with a measly 16 expertise that is granted by talents and glyph, however your threat will take a dive because Expertise is the best threat stat when you are below the soft cap.

My choices

I agree with Theck on his assessment of the EH set (I would be an idiot to ever disagree with the man), and Will more than likely sport the same type of gear set for my progression Hard Mode encounters. For my personal gear selection, I will more than likely continue to hold off until I know that my gear needs an upgrade. This is because the longer I hold out, the more likely it is that I will have some other pieces drop from the bosses, such as the boots, which would change my decisions on order of acquisition.

Good luck to all of you on your gearing selections, and may the tank drops be plentiful…

Vindictive people suck

I rarely bitch and moan about these type of things on my blog, but today I was faced with one of those individuals for whom you truly wish would get what is coming to them. I know that WoW is a game, and that for a small monthly fee, you are basically allowed to do what ever you please with your character, however I ran into a new and painful method of greifing which I hope blizzard fixes quite soon.

I logged on this morning to do my daily heroic on my toons, another one of those great inventions that I must thank blizzard for in the future (lets put people that can kill Heroic Dungeon bosses in less than 20 seconds back in there so they can revisit the encounters and think of better days) for the Emblem of Frost system that has allowed everyone to get the gear that they want at little to no true difficulty, and make the people that will actually put it to good use farm for months on end. Ok, sorry about that little rant, I’m ok now.

Back to the story, I logged on, queued for a dungeon with a few guildies, and got a pug healer and dps. We zoned into the lorefest of an instance that is Caverns of Time, and quickly went about our business of waiting for Arathas’s slow ass to make it to the start of the zone. Once we got going, everything was fine, but I noticed that our healer was in full pvp gear, disc spec, and basically throwing bubbles out and /afk. I think that if there was a tank in there which wasnt as geared he would have been kicked before the first boss. Well, no matter for our group, I have like 50k hp and can heal myself. First boss up, first boss down in record time. Second boss up, Second boss down just as quick.

moving on to the final gauntlet with 11 minutes left on the timer for the bronze drake, and the priest says:

Sorry guys, I gotta take off, good luck, yes yes I really have to go even though we are 3 minutes from clearing the instance…

and promptly teleports out of the dungeon. For the first 30 seconds, I thought maybe something was wrong, or he had to help his gramdam because she fell down the stairs. But as time passed, it was obvious that he intentionally left the instance, while staying in the party so that we could not get another healer into the instance. We tried inviting a guildy to the party, and found that we had saved him but he couldn’t get in the instance. After about 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to get this guy out of our party, all the while reciving messages which told us we could not Vote to Kick this player at the current time, we ended up having to disband the group and run a whole new instance.

While normally its not that big of a deal, I understand if people have to go, or if an emergency comes up, but this guy was doing it on purpose, just to spite us. Since he was out of the instance, and on another server, I couldn’t kick him, I couldn’t ignore him, we were just forced to run another instance due to someones idea of a sick joke. I really hope blizzard fixes this kind of thing. They should put a time limit on trips away from the dungeon before you are automatically kicked. Needless to say, after that experience, until the system is changed, I will be running my 1 a day with guildies and no more charity work for the needy.

Deviating from the plan

I wanted to talk about trash packs, their abilities, and the best way to counter them, so that people have some solid information on the first few rooms of the instance, and what you as a tank should know and do about them. However, I forgot to take a few screen shots while dpsing the crap out of the trash on my hunter this past weekend. As a result, I still dont know the names of any of the trash packs, and I do not have enough visual aids to give my “Presentation” to you guys, so that post will have to wait another day. Instead, I would like to talk about primordial saronite, its uses and benefits to both us as tanks and our guilds as a whole. My reasoning behind this digression is a current debate that my guild is having in our forums. The problem is that currency is scarce during these first few weeks of the patch, and everyone wants a cookie from the cookie jar.

Primordial saronites are used for crafting some very nice gear as well as purchasing the patterns for said gear. They are also used to start up the Shadowmourne quest chain which will ultimately get one of your guildies a juicy legendary. As the proud owner of a legendary (Hand of Ragnaros) back when it was still the Best in Slot item, I have to tell you that it was part of some of the most fun I have ever had in this game. The numbers were huge, and I loved every minute of it. Alas I continue to digress. Back to the topic at hand, the currency known as primordial saronite. While the item is used for cloth, leather, mail, and plate crafted items, I want to focus on the tank loot, as that is what we care about, and ultimately what will probably be put on the back burner for other things.

The boots and the legs

We have the option of crafting two different pieces of gear which aid us in completing two very different gear sets. The boots, also known as the Boots of Kingly Upheaval are a great upgrade for your threat set. Thats right, these are only really good for your threat set. While you may have to wait a bit for your progression set boots, they will come and they are much better for overall survival. The Grinning Skull Greatboots are in all ways superior for your main tanking set to the craftable boots. If you compare the boots, you gain 80 defense, and trade 72 parry for 53 Expertise. Both of the craftable items this patch have zero defense on them, and while we can easily reach the 540 minimum with out having all of our gear itemized with defense, you have to remember that defense gives you pure avoidance, plain and simple. And we have already seen that there are quite a few fights in this instance where avoidance is rewarded.

In the end, what you can see here is that you are trading hit for expertise. After my last post, and Thecks great work showing its importance, I believe that the zone drop boots are far superior to the craftable ones. This means that we do not have to worry about spending our precious badges on primordial saronite this early on in the instance. It goes with out saying, that once you have this place on farm and you are getting tons of badges a week, the Boots of Kingly Upheaval are very nice threat boots and should be crafted at some point.

On to the Choices in legs. We actually have three choices when it comes to the legs, and they each serve a different purpose. I first want to discuss the two legs that you do not have to craft, the T10 legs and the Legguards of lost hope. They both have identical values of armor, strength, and sockets. The Tier gear has more stamina, more defense, and dodge and expertise while the Legguards of lost hope have hit and more dodge. With the current gemming philosophies, the socket bonus is lost on the T10 legs, however, if you are gearing for threat, you already out gear the encounter and can pick up the socket bonus of the Legguards of Lost Hope. This is a clear case of threat versus avoidance pants.

Now if we move on to the crafted pants, we can see that the bonus armor that they provide is amazing, and will be a step in the right direction when creating a pure physical damage mitigation set. However these too do not have any defense itemization, and as a result will more than likely be a piece for a physical mitigation fight, and not your main tanking or progression pants. If you look closer at these, the 1190 bonus armor will be great, they still have three sockets and 207 stamina as well as a descent amount of avoidance. These scream physical mitigation for heavy melee.

Why the rant?

I wanted to get some things on paper regarding this so that we can make some educated decisions for the first month or so of the instance. As Emblems of Frost are scarce and we need them for everything from our belt, cloak, and trinket, to all of our tier gear, it is important to know the relative priority of things such as crafted items and primordial saronite. My conclusion is that it is not worth it for us to spend our badges on primordials as we have better options for our progression sets. As we get deeper and deeper into the instance, and we get more and more badges per week, these things can be of value to us, but not before we gear up to clear the instance first.

As promised, I hope to have a post tomorrow on the Trash in the ICC instance, proper pulls and abilities, as well as a few tricks of the trade so that you can make your runs go smoother.

Badges, we don’t need no stinkin’ Badges (part Deux)…

There has been a lot of discussion on Icecrown Citadel, the bosses, the trash, the gear, the reputation grinds, the primordial saronite, and the patterns, and I am sure that these discussions will continue for quite a few weeks to come. However, there are a few things I would like to focus on, for both my own personal gain as well as my desire to inform our community of our upcoming decisions. Before I get into the options we have for our badges, I wanted to give everyone a heads up that I am looking to throw up a post regarding the trash in ICC, and how to best handle it. But, since we blew through it and AoE’ed it down, I have forgotten more than I remembered.

Back to the topic at hand. Currently we are limited in our ability to acquire badges. For me personally I run both the 10 and 25 man Icecrown Citadels on Tuesday, the weekly Raid quest, and one to two heroic dailies a week. One of my biggest concerns is not being able to gear up quick enough to stay ahead of the gear curve. At that pace, I will be earning approximately 25 badges a week. While that is not something that I would give up, it is still not enough to actually give me enough gear before the second wing comes out. Because of our nature as tanks, and my specific need to get all the gear from the badge vendor that I would use in any of my five gear sets, I need a lot of badges. Couple that with the fact that you need them for your tier gear and you are placed in a difficult dilemma.

We have three more weeks of farming the instance. After that, the next wing will open up and we will have three more bosses to accumulate badges from. Until then, we have to make a wise first choice on what we should spend our badges on. Below I will discuss our options, the pros and cons of each piece, and my personal recommendation for what to pick up first.

Come meet your newest Quartermaster!

For myself, Magister Arlan will be getting a lot of business in the coming weeks. He has quite a few things to offer us, and should we choose to purchase the goods that he has to offer, we also do so at the expense of our tier gear. So we will choose wisely…

Corroded Skeleton Key

I will start with the no brainer. Even if you are running around yelling “I’m the JUGGERNAUT BITCH” because you have the 245 and 258 trinkets from the Champions Cache in Trial, this is still a juicy upgrade netting you with a 36 stamina upgrade. For anyone that is using anything less, you are just benefiting more from using this BiS trinket. This trinket costs 60 Emblems of Frost, and will for me be my first acquisition.

Sentinel’s Winter Cloak

For those of you who are starting to ask yourselves about all the bonus armor flying around and what you should do about it, here is your answer (in my opinion): pick up any and every bonus armor piece you can get your hands on. Most of them have comparable stamina values, and just sacrifice some avoidance or expertise/hit for bonus armor. While it would not be the greatest idea to go in there with all bonus armor pieces in there and no avoidance, a mixture of bonus armor pieces will allow you to increase your ability to mitigate damage. If you take a look at the stats, you have ample defense and dodge to go around, as well as a yellow socket. This will net you, with a 30 stamina gem, 154 stamina and 737 armor from a CLOAK!

When you compare this cloak to your other options, it seems like a very nice upgrade. For anyone but the few that are running around with a Pride of the Demon Lord (heroic) and a Cloak of the Unflinching Guardian (sorry I dont know the alliance terms, but the two 258 cloaks), this cloak is also a no brainer. If you are using anything but the 258 cloaks this will be a massive upgrade in stamina and armor, with little to no loss in the avoidance area. This is exactly the itemization we are looking for in a progression set as we charge towards Arathas.

Libram of the Eternal Tower

There has already been some discussion on this topic over at MainTankadin, and I am in agreement with most of them. 30 badges for 19 dodge rating that needs a ramp up time is not worth it. Eventually you may want to get this one, but for now, I will be sticking with my trusty Libram of Defiance. I would say that this goes towards the bottom of the list when it comes to upgrades that will require badges (almost everything!). Remember this libram will be competing with your Tier gear when it comes to Emblems of Frost. You will get a much better return on investment by upgrading to T10.

Verdigris Chain Belt

Now we are getting to the meat and potatoes of the currency controversy. The plate items. While I chose to talk about the belt first because its a great item, the chest and the gloves will be a bit more difficult to figure out. You will want to pick them up, however if those are two pieces that you want for your T10, then you have to make that decision on whether or not you are willing to go with out our juicy threat from the two piece T10 set bonus. Alas, I digress. Back to the belt, this bad boy has got some great itemization, and by the looks of the gear in ICC, parry will be somewhat attractive because of teh 1.88:1 ratio issues we may run into. What I mean by this is that the gear out of ICC has a lot of dodge on it and we will more than likely face a point at which parry will give us more per itemization point than dodge.

If you compare this to the Belt of Bloodied Scars, you gain everything! They swapped dodge for parry, so that you can take advantage of the diminishing returns on dodge that you will be facing. And they gave you 688 bonus armor over the Belt of bloodied scars. With an 11 stamina and 6 strength gain to boot, I don’t see how that squeezed that much out of a small item level upgrade but they did. This should definitely be second or third on your list, depending on what your bigger gain is, belt or cloak.

The rest of the pieces

As I stated above, there is a chest and gloves with bonus armor on them from the Emblem of Frost vendor, and I will be picking them up eventually, however with the methods in which you pick up tier gear, you may want to start on gathering some T10 before you go for off set pieces. Unless you are wearing full 258 gear, the T10 will be a nice upgrade for you, especially if you can get your hands on some “Trophies” to change a 251 piece into a 264 piece. Really what we are looking at with the chest and gloves is bonus armor over other stats. I personally love the fact that the T10 gloves have tons of Stamina, dodge, and hit on them. As these pieces are more for gear sets and not direct upgrades that I would want to take before gathering my T10 set, I wont touch as much on them. By all means if you have a very weak piece in the chest or glove slot they are very good pieces of loot, but they are marginal upgrades when it comes to T9.

Where did my shield go?

Last night, I finally decided to start picking up pieces for my ret set. I have been able to pick them up for quite some time, but have been passing on them for our healing paladins, and other tanks, as I use my dual spec for different tanking specs and I really haven’t tried to get any ret gear in a long time. To give you an idea of what kind of ret gear I have accumulated, my shoulders were tier 7, I have 47 expertise, and about 200 hit. Needless to say, my ret set is the essence of hand me down pieces. As our trophies have been going to offspec for a few weeks now, and we accumulate around 20 trophies a week, I am really not inhibiting raid progress. I have taken 6 trophies for my main spec since the beginning of ToTC, and these six pieces have gone towards my four piece in my normal tanking set, head, shoulders, chest, and gloves, as well as the head and legs for my Anub’arak unhittable set.

As for my ret set, at the end of our 10 man Trial of the Grand Crusade last night, I linked the trophy and no one needed it for main spec any more. Seeing as everyone truly contributes the same amount in a 10 man Tribute to Insanity, it is a free for all on the off spec trophies. I rolled a 95 and I snagged a trophy. The mount has escaped me the past two weeks, and the tanking cloak has not dropped for my group yet, so all I took away from the run was a trophy, which i was more than happy with. I talked to our resident retadin, and asked him if any of the pieces were more “valuable” than the others. His response was fairly relieving that none of them were really more powerful than the others, so tailor my order to my stats. This was good news since I desperately wanted to get rid of my T7 shoulders.

I picked up the T9.245 shoulders, flew over to the Sons of Hodir quartermaster to grab a shoulder enchant, and hearthed back to Dalaran for some gems. I had two things to gem, seeing as I neglected to do anything to the weapon I had gotten the week before. After gemming and enchanting my sword and shoulders, I evaluated my ret set and came to the conclusion that I am still not presentable enough to be seen in public wearing it. This leads me to my discussion for the day, what can a tank do to gear up their offspec and what type of priority do you need to place on your gear?

As Honors says, you need your CAPtains…

The thing that I am struggling with by piecing my gear together is maintaining my caps. Specifically the hit cap and the expertise soft cap. As a dps, the most important thing you can do is become hit capped, because no matter how much crit and AP you have, if you are missing your attacks, you are not doing any damage. When I first started out assembling a ret set, hit was not a problem, I had 331 hit but I only had 9 expertise. The tables have turned lately, and I am under hit cap and at 47 expertise. Balancing these stats normally is not much of a problem, as I have learned on my hunter and her Hit, Haste, ArP ballet. However, when you are dealing with gearing an offspec and, in our guilds case, you have to roll against every tank and holy pally, you take what you can get.

This comes as no surprise to me, but my trinkets and rings are very weak. These are the first thing I will be trying to upgrade, as they are the most difficult to acquire. You can get a ring from the 245 vendor, and I will plan on doing that soon, along with my 200 strength libram, however I think that the evaluation of what else I can get with trophies over my current gear is in order as well. Really what it comes down to is that I have to shed some expertise with out getting rid of any hit, because I am a bit below the hit cap at 245. As the loot drops in ToTC, and everyone has gotten their day in the sun, I will start picking up items. We also have a ton of crusader orbs, unfortunately all of the crafted items have tons of armor pen on them, and that is not something that I am too interested in.

In the end, I will have to rely on the luck of the drops in ToTC to complete my set, which is fine by me. Soon enough you will see me running around with a two hander and some T9 just for fun…

As the third week of the coliseum is upon us, it is time for me to make some decisions about my limited number of badges and how to spend them. Depending on how hard core you are, you may (as some of the tanks on my server have already done) have picked up an item already. If so, I am quite jealous. I personally, however, can not afford to do the heroic daily every single day, my work schedule and girlfriend just do not allow that. I do complete the daily every day of my three day weekend though, leaving me with 32 badges at the moment, and rapidly approaching 50 by the end of the night.

Now that I have a significant number of badges, what will be the best piece of gear for me to pick up, and why. Lets look at my choices to better understand what kind of decision and analysis will be necessary. You have a ring, a trinket, a libram, Shoulders, and a piece of tier gear (if you have the trophy).

The obvious choice for pure flexibility is the tier piece, as you can pick up the gloves or the shoulders with 45 badges of triumph and the trophy of the crusade. But now down to the specifics of my decision. The first thing I have to consider is what am I looking to gain by upgrading a piece of gear. Do I want to increase my survivability, threat, or avoidance. Each of the pieces has a strength.

Upgrading your Tier Gear

If you already received a Trophy of the Crusade, then your obvious choice would be to select a piece of T9 to augment your gear set. A direct comparison of the T8 to T9 for both the shoulders and the gloves shows us that they are both a gain of 24 stamina. You gain more armor with the shoulders, and trade up defense and dodge for shield block value and rating. You throw in a bit of expertise, and you have a descent piece. An overall significant upgrade in stamina, armor, and avoidance for little loss in SBV.

The Gloves are similar to the shoulders in pure stat benefits. You also gain armor, stamina, and dodge. But instead of expertise, you gain 53 parry as well. A very nice piece for an avoidance set. The loss of 135 block value from either piece is not that big of a hit for the increase in other pure tanking stats, however if you combine the two pieces together, a loss of 270 SBV is starting to take a chunk out of your overall shield block value, causing a drop in SoR threat and mitigation. Alas, its a decision, but not a tough one because we should all a block set, and a threat set, and an avoidance set to chose from, this is just more loot to optimize these sets.

Either way you look at it, these are great upgrades if you do not use your 4 piece T7 bonus and are able to drop down another piece of tier gear.

The off set Shoulders, Trinket, and Ring from the badge vendor

The shoulders from the vendor net similar statistics to the T9 Shoulders, however you will not be benefiting from the set bonuses that the Tier gear will provide. The shoulderguards of enduring order are attractive at first glance because they trade expertise for parry. From an avoidance stand point they are looking very nice, and if you are lacking robust avoidance, they may be something that you want to consider.

The trinket is a defender’s code on steroids, lots of armor and an on use dodge. For me, This is a great effective health piece, however not top of my list. I appreciate the power of close to 2000 armor in pure damage reduction, however pending the last three encounters of the coliseum, I do not see as much utility in this as the other pieces. Now if there happens to be a boss that stuns or silences you periodically, this trinket will be one of the first to get equipped. 50 badges may seem like a low now, but in a few weeks when you are taking home more than 30 a week, it can be acquired in no time.

Finally, I have saved the best for last (in my opinion). The Clutch of Fortification is the Leviathan’s coil with more of everything. From an effective health (both the stamina and the armor), avoidance and strength, its a great upgrade from whatever else you are wearing. With this upgrade, I gain 20 stamina (4 less than a tier piece), 560 armor (more than a tier piece), Defense and Dodge rating. I can use it for my effective health set, my avoidance set, and my overall BiS set.